Pages

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Anti-Loca Sancta: John Mandeville's Second Pilgrimage

"Now wole Y telle of yles and dyverse peple"

The Travels of John Mandeville

_________________________

_________________________

The Fifty-four Isles

The Book of John Mandeville is effectively two books and two pilgrimages. The first half of the book, lines 1 to about 1,425, concerns Mandeville's travels from England to the Holy Land. The second half of the book, 1,425 to about 2,850, tells the story of a new pilgrimage, starting from the center of the Christian world towards India, China, and various islands. In many respects, this is a reversal of the standard pilgrimage genre followed in the first narrative, where he moves from the margins towards the center of the medieval mappa mundi, to the loca sancta of Jerusalem. Erring from this well established flow of biopower, Mandeville walks down and away from the holy city on the mount to explore elsewheres, moving from the center to the margins. During these treks, Mandeville visits various prominent lands with the major kingdoms being given one or more chapters devoted to them. Chapter Thirteen, "Dyverseteis of Peple and of Contreis," stands out as a representative of the major mission and theory of this second pilgrimage. Not only does it begin with Mandeville offering what constitutes a new introduction, much like the one given in chapter one, but contains more lands than any other chapter, in excess of fifty-four individual islands. Chapter thirteen is particularly large, making up around 18%, approximately 1/5 of the whole Travels.

Bringing his first pilgrimage from England to Jerusalem to an end, Mandeville begins chapter thirteen with a new commission that would take him from Christianity's loca sancta towards place on the margins; in a sense, inverting the proper flow of bodies in space. "And sithen Y have devysed byfor the Holy Londe and contrees ther aboute, and many weyes and to the Mount Synay, and to Babyloyne, and other places," recounts Mandeville of his many travels to the conventional places of religious significance, "now wole Y telle of yles and dyverse peple and bestes" (Ln. 1378-1382). The "now" marks in time the moment of departure on a new pilgrimage with new goals. Rather than privileging the central places and forms of embodying Christian ideals, Mandeville will be leaving these peoples and places behind to show the diversity of the world that has been shoved away elsewhere, to the margins. The need to tell of these places and people are evident because of their alienation from central Christian public life and discourse. Other pilgrimages and travels may make note of monsters and wonders, demonstrating them as freak-shows, places of interest that one may pass on the way to proper loca sancta. But Mandeville makes a point to announce the margins not merely as curiosities of the road but as goals in and of themselves. In this way, he establishes the margins as a kind of second, alternative loca sancta. These places and people become a kind of "anti-loca sancta" by attracting pilgrims away from the center of the world and culture and thus establishing through movement a reorientation of values.

Many of the lands are named and many are not. At one point, Mandeville is devoting one or two sentences per isle in an attempt to cram as many in as possible. Yet while as a narrator, Mandeville is quite loquacious in describing the diversity of peoples and places, even he is unable to contain the great number referenced in chapter thirteen. After going through a litany of places, each given shorter and shorter descriptions, at last he puts a pin in the project. "Many other maner of peple beth theraboute, of wham hit were to moche to telle," writes Mandeville by way of confessing how much is left out of his book that he witnesses in the diversity of the world. While the center of the world is structured to remain the same, gaining its power through its definite orienting place, the power of the margins is that they keep on going. The people of the mountain enter into a siege position, cloistered in the mechanisms that work to make the structure of embodiment and location fixed. Yet those at the bottom, along the edges, can keep on moving and changing. Rome must be fixed and tangible to maintain power, while Paradise and it's islands can keep on cresting just over the next horizon.

_________________________

_________________________

The Mountain of Adam's Tears

While the mountains of Jerusalem collectively form the loca sancta of Christianity, an implicit and integral part of Mandeville's second pilgrimage to the margins is based on the potentially superseding holiness of Eastern sites for the faith. Jerusalem may be located in the center of the T and O map but Paradise is positioned in a privileged place is at its top. As Mandeville moves away from the earthly Jerusalem, towards the margins, he moves towards the earthly Paradise. The garden of Eden is imagined in other medieval sources as the Anti-Loca Sancta to Jerusalem and Rome. Dante's Divine Comedy positions Paradise high atop a mountain on the far side of the world. Yet like Dante, Mandeville's journey to Paradise is not direct but wandering."A te convien tenere altro vïaggio," says Virgil, warning Dante to take an indirect path ('It behoves you to take an alternative way,' Dante. La Commedia. Canto I). While the center of the Christian world is fixed, or should be if the geopolitical world were a settled thing, the elsewheres open up a vast variety of possible trajectories and modes of emplotment that open up alternative pilgrimage narratives. A fourteenth century reader knows what to expect from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, indeed Mandeville has already gone through many of those motions by the midpoint of his Book in his first pilgrimage. This second pilgrimage towards Paradise is not as familiar a tale. Mandeville is not as constrained by convention either in literary narratives nor in historical pilgrimages, although he has plenty of sources from which to draw ideas. By being Mandeville's second Loca Sancta, this alternative pilgrimage can amalgamate to it a vast diversity of places and peoples; expanding the narrative world map in the process.In the introduction of his second pilgrimage, Mandeville draws a strong association between the diverse places and people he will be visiting with the earthly Paradise in the utter East. "For ther beth many diverse peple and bestes and contrees, which beth departed by the foure flodes that cometh out of Paradys Terrestre," claims Mandeville (1378-1382). Diversity itself seems to flow out Paradise as the waters separate places and peoples from one another like the precious stones said to be deposited by its outlets. Indeed, Mandeville tells of these stones and their power of healing but only if the carrier holds them on his left side, pointing them towards the East (W.T. Fernie 69). Paradise calls its scattered stones back to itself with interest in the form of bodies it brings back with it. The East calls bodies from the Center (Rome and Jerusalem) for a different kind of healing if they are willing to move toward the Anti-Loca Sancta. Paradise in this way functions as an opposing signifier for the Holy Lands. Eden represents a wholeness that breaks apart into division, whereas the mountains of Christ's death and the mountain of the Vatican represent the place where division is brought back together. All roads lead to Rome but all rivers lead away from Paradise. The common descent of diverse peoples, including monsters, is a key component in Augustine's examination of Hermaphrodites in De Civitate Dei (Augustine XVI.viii). It is likely that the author of Mandeville's Travels was aware of this discussion when this narrative was composed. Following the project of imagining elsewheres, Mandeville's narrative mapping echoes Augustine's assertion that monstrous peoples share a common descent from Adam and his choice of Hermaphrodites as a key example of an othered group that nonetheless likely shares kinship.Between the mountain of the first Adam, Eden, and the mountain of the second Adam, Golgotha, is located a way station where the first humans mourned their tribulation. In the eastern islands, near the Isles of the Amazons and Hermaphrodites, writes Mandeville, "There is a mountain in this land and in the middle of this mountain there is a plain with a great pool with a large quantity of water in it. Local people say that Adam and Eve wept on that mountain one hundred years after their expulsion from Paradise, and they say that the water is their tears" (Bale 85-86). This mountain top pool of sorrow shared a bitter similarity to the mountain of Hermaphroditus, cursed waters where the child of Hermes and Aphrodite was raped and transformed. These anti-loca sancta are not always places of joy. Sometimes places can become sites of pilgrimage out of great sufferings, confinements, and exiles that occurred there. These places become troubled middles in stories that do not always have an evident end. They become places of pause, where the divisions of life can be contemplated. It is perhaps not so surprising that Mandeville soon turns to peoples such as the Hermaphrodites and Amazons who seem stuck on their islands, unable to move beyond their place on the margins. Indeed, as in the anti-queer, anti-trans, and anti-intersex arguments of many doctors, these peoples seem stuck in what may now be called, "disorders in sexual development." Such medical professionals see transgender and intersex as diversions or delays in the progress towards wholesome forms of embodiment and masculinity, towards the central norms of society; sometimes due to personal trauma. In recent years, Critical Transgender and Intersex Studies in and outside of medicine have debunked the trauma theory of gender in favor of a diversity or liberation model. Yet there remains a draw to return and dwell with places of isolation and exile that long defined gender alterity even as the movement works to gain the power to move elsewhere.

_________________________

_________________________

Peoples of the East

The Islands of the Amazons and the Hermaphrodites are two key places described in chapter thirteen but around them are the accounting of over fifty-four islands that imagine the great diversity of possible genres of embodiment. These numerous islands were confederated under a single ruler operating out of the Island of Dodyn. "The kyng of that ile is a gret lord and myghty," writes Mandeville, "and he hath under hym 54 iles, and ech of hem hath a kyng" (1885-1900). Within the King's own land, "ther / beth many diversytees of men" (1869-1870). Yet his Kingdom was marked, as are many other places on the margins, by cannibalism. Cannibalism has a variety of significances in the Middle Ages and particularly in early European narratives about far off peoples. Among these meanings include a lack of civilization, usually equated to proper Christianity and Western Patriarchy. Furthermore, as medieval Animal Studies scholars, such as Karl Steel have argued in How to Make A Human, humanity is defined against bestiality in the Middle Ages by the taboo against eating human flesh. The act of cannibalism sets the margins apart from the central human community, where the line blurs between animal and human, person and monster. Importantly, it also blurs the distinction between inside and outside, as well as insider and outsider. The text says that the people who live under the King each family members as well as friends, husbands consuming wives, children eating fathers. Violence is not an act against an Other but committed on those of the same blood and flesh. Cannibalism of this kind may be seen as what happens when insularity, isolation, and consolidation become incestuously close-circuited.

Under the King are the fifty-four islands that are not all directly described as cannibals but who challenge the limits of human embodiment in other ways. Directly around the Island of Hermaphrodites are people with one eye, people with their face in their chests, or two small holes for eyes. After the hermaphrodites, Mandeville describes people with holes for mouths who must consume food through straws. One people have "oon eye, and that is in the myddes of her forhede," (Mandeville). Another, have "noon heed, and her eyen beth in her shuldres," (Mandeville). Another have "a plat visage withoute nose and eye, but they have two smale holes instede of eyen," (Mandeville). In each case, the placement and kind of eyes are prominent. Indeed, among the islands described, there is a fixation on the diversity of faces. The face is a key signifier for humanity. In traditional Islamic art, there is a directive not to illustrate eyes because it too closely resembles the act of giving life reserved for God. For Mandeville and his readers, there is an anxiety that while they gaze on the freakshow of the East, the freaks may be looking back at the center. The intermixing of hermaphrodite bodies with other monstrous peoples puts intersexuality within the spectrum of crip embodiment and marginalization. Hermaphrodicism is yet another way to be a monster, a freak, or an infirm. Modern intersex and disability politics further the implicit argument nascent in Mandeville's islands: there is not intersex and non-intersex bodies nor disabled and non-disabled bodies, rather there is bio-diversity. While the definition of the ideal body promised by the loca-sancta of pilgrimage as the goal of travel and salvation, the definition of marginalized bodies includes more diversity than can be contained in a single book. There is one way to be the same but countless ways to be different.While pilgrimage functions by drawing bodies from the margins to loca sancta, thereby subordinating bodies to its dynamics of place, there is a privilege in being able to move. It is by movement that power systems of place are reinforced or challenged. Thus a second level of subordination becomes enforced by pilgrimage: those who move through space and those who are rooted in place. As a mover, Mandeville distinguishes himself from the places and peoples he observes in his second pilgrimage. They may orient and attract his movements but are themselves immobile. The people of and around India, including the Hermaphrodites and Amazons, are effectively disabled by their environment. "For they / dwelleth under a planete that men clepith Saturne... And for Saturne is of so late steryng, therfore / men that dwelleth under hym and that clymate haveth no good wyll to mech / styryng aboute," writes Mandeville (Ln. 1543). The freaks, monsters, hermaphrodites, and amazons are all disabled by the place where they live and the planet that governs it. This in part explains why Mandeville is permitted to travel to see them while they remain rooted in place. He is socially, physically, even super-naturally able to move because of the affects of his environment. "[I]n our contré is all the contrarye, for we beth in a clymate that / is of the mone and of leyght styryng, and that is the planete of way," writes Mandeville (Ln. 1543). "And therfore / hit gyveth us wyll to be moch steryng and to go into diverse contreis of the worlde, / for hit passeth aboute the worlde more leyghtlych than another planete." Although England and the Eastern Isles are both on the margins, they exist under different astrological powers. It is thus by the authority of the natural environment that the English are empowered with mobility and the peoples of the east are disabled. The English may enact the power to reify or resist the structuring of space while the bodies of Indians, hermaphrodites, and Amazons are bound to their place. In this way, the Isles are anti-loca to the Holy Lands but also to England.